FT.com / Comment / Opinion - The west's strategic options in Afghanistan - The Diigo Meta page

• 03 Nov 09
  

  Conrad Barwa

  Afghanistan-NATOpolicy Afghanistan-US-strategy

  • The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, whose books on the Taliban and regional crisis have gained an international audience, argues in the current National Interest that the US must stay the course. If it does not, he says, there is a serious prospect of “Talibanisation” of the entire region and the Taliban is inseparably entwined with al-Qaeda. Neighbouring Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan face pauperisation, and consequent Islamic insurgencies against their corrupt and incompetent rulers. Mr Rashid paints a bleak picture of Pakistan’s predicament, with the civilian government too weak to stand up to the army – still obsessed with India – and the economy in freefall. Mr Rashid suggests a danger of a “colonels’ coup”, which installs an Islamabad regime sympathetic to the Taliban.
  • Another Pakistani blogs in the US Small Wars Journal. Mehar Omar Khan, a student at the US Army’s Fort Leavenworth command school, describes himself, a little mawkishly, as “a Pakistani infantry officer who may soon end up being another name on an ever-growing list of the fallen soldiers in the war against terror”. Major Khan, like Mr Rashid, urges the west not to go home – instead of flinching from the difficulties of success, consider the price of failure.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • Major Khan says, surely rightly, that the root cause of the insurgency is not religion but poverty. The difficulty for the west is to identify means of improving conditions for Pakistanis, Afghans and central Asian peoples whose chronically corrupt leaderships steal everything within their reach. Neither the Afghan nor Pakistani polity seems able to deliver civil and economic progress to its people.
    • Security is indispensable to achieve this, but troops cannot substitute for viable local institutions. A neo-colonialist approach is logistically and politically impossible. Since major Nato military operations started in Afghanistan in 2006, support for the insurgency has grown. Why should an intensified foreign commitment be any more popular among Afghans?
• 01 Nov 09
  

  Colin Henderson

  pakistan afghanistan afpak rashid ft.com

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